Monday, May 07, 2007

US Mainstream Media Keeping Americans Ignorant

US Mainstream Media Keeping Americans Ignorant

There are many examples of the US media keeping facts about Israel from the American public, I list some here:

"After three weeks of virtual war in the Israeli-occupied territories, Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced a new plan to determine the final status of the region. During these weeks, over 100 Palestinians were killed, including 30 children, often by "excessive use of lethal force in circumstances in which neither the lives of the security forces nor others were in imminent danger, resulting in unlawful killings," Amnesty International concluded in a detailed report that was scarcely mentioned in the US.The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead was then about 15-1, reflecting the resources of force available." - Noam Chomsky, Al-Ahram Weekly, November 2-8, 2000

"Due to the time difference between Israel and New York, reports that Israel had responded to the Hezbollah raid with artillery and tank fire, and that its air force had struck roads and bridges in Lebanon, were posted on the Ha’aretz web site at 4:28 p.m. in Israel-that is, 9:28 a.m. in New York on July 12. The report from the Associated Press that Israeli war planes had hit at least 30 targets in southern Lebanon was also available in New York on July 12. Yet the Times’ editorial page not only supported Israel’s illegal military reprisals against Lebanon as “justifiable,” it misidentified a key sequence of events by reporting on July 13 that Hezbollah’s missile attacks on Israel came before Israel’s airstrikes in Lebanon." - Media ViewsCommonDreams:The Winograd Report v. the New York Times(5/3/07) by Howard Friel

"On August 14, the New York Times addressed one of the significant worries for U.S. media outlets covering the Israeli bombing and invasion of Lebanon: Civilians in Lebanon were the primary victims, dying in far greater numbers than Israeli military personnel and civilians combined. (Amnesty International estimated that the fighting killed about 1,000 civilians in Lebanon and about 40 in Israel—8/23/06.)

The problem for U.S. media was how to obscure that fact. As the Times put it, "Particularly vexing for many American news organizations is the struggle to determine how and in what proportion images of civilian dead and injured should be displayed in their coverage, when one side’s casualties greatly surpass the other’s." - Lives in the BalanceMedia 'vexed' by civilian deaths in LebanonBy Peter Hart

"The next couple of days -- there was no Palestinian fire at this time -- Israel used U.S. helicopters (Israel produces no helicopters) to attack civilian complexes, killing about a dozen people and wounding several dozen.

Clinton reacted to that on October 3, 2000 by making the biggest deal in a decade -- to send Israel new military helicopters which had just been used for the purpose I described and of course would continue to be.

The U.S. press co-operated with that by refusing to publish the story. To this day, they have not published the fact." - Chomsky